February 16, 1999

Warp Back To Earth 66/99

Alarmingly, the most accessible track on [B]'Warp Back To Earth'[/B] sounds like a heavily sedated [a]Jimi Hendrix[/a]...

7 / 10 Alarmingly, the most accessible track on 'Warp Back To Earth' sounds like a heavily sedated Jimi Hendrix being operated on incompetently by aliens with malfunctioning equipment. It is truly, brilliantly horrible.

And the essence of Peter Thomas, an obscure German soundtrack composer recently rediscovered in the quest for new exotica carried out by the planet's sicker audiophiles: Pulp lifted the orchestral sample on 'This Is Hardcore' from his 'Space Patrol'.

Here, 29 pieces from the late-'60s and early-'70s have been clinically extracted from his archives for one CD, then remixed by the usual avant-garde suspects from Britain, Germany and Japan for another. The original material effectively acts as a beats and breaks LP for the retro-futurist set, all freaked proto-synth effects and fragmented guitar breaks that defy the knee-jerk 'kitschy' label.

As, indeed, do the remixes. The unerringly wonderful Stereolab and High Llamas manage to rebuild Thomas' raw materials into their own images, while Mina manage to rebuild Thomas' raw materials into Stereolab's image. Clever. Dauerfisch's 'Es Lduft', meanwhile, is a terrifyingly fine approximation of how Add N To (X) going big beat would sound, and even Saint Etienne come across as strangely, woozily beautiful on 'Chaos In The Gym', possibly through the novelty of having a good tune to work with.

Thomas' gift for making deep space a profoundly uneasy place to visit - light years away from the typical optimistic sheen of much old sci-fi music - is all over 'Warp Back To Earth'. Very atmospheric, even in zero gravity.

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